If being human is not what conveys moral worth, then what does?  The answer to this question varies.  But, as we shall see, the increased embrace of human unexceptionalism cuts across a wide array of ideologies.

Let's first look at secular bioethics, the philosophy of health care and public policy taught in our most elite universities.  The predominating view in bioethics is that being human is not what gives one value, but rather, possessing sufficient capacities to be considered a "person."  Known as "personhood theory," believers argue that a being—whether human, animal, machine, or extraterrestrial—all must be measured by the same criteria, and each must earn the highest value by possessing minimal cognitive capacities, such as being "self aware over time."  This means that there is such a thing in bioethics as the so-called "human non person," human beings who have not yet attained personhood—such as embryos, fetuses, and newborn infants—and those who lose it due to injury or illness that significantly impairs cognitive capacity.   

It isn't safe to be a non person.  Non persons, in this belief, do not possess the intrinsic right to life or bodily integrity.  Thus some bioethicists argue for the moral righteousness of infanticide, cloned fetal farming, and the right to harvest organs from those diagnosed in persistent vegetative states. 

Philosophical materialists also believe that being human alone is insufficient to convey moral value.  In this view, since all life evolved out of the same primordial ooze, and because humans share genes with other life forms, species distinctions are fictional.  This means, as novelist and journalist John Darnton put it in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005, "We are all of us, dogs and barnacles, pigeons and crabgrass, the same in the eyes of nature, equally remarkable and equally dispensable."

The animal rights/liberation movement also seeks to knock us off the pedestal in the cause of elevating animals to equal moral worth with people.  Thus, many liberationists urge that we base a being's value on, "painience," that is, the capacity to experience pain.  Since a cow feels pain as well as a human, bovines are people too, and hence, ranching cattle is as evil as slavery. 

Radical environmentalists and deep ecologists go even farther, claiming not only that human beings are not exceptional, but moreover, that we are a "vermin species" afflicting the living planet Gaia.  Not only that, but the answer to the human infection is radical depopulation.  Some believe it can be done by most of us not having children.  Others yearn for a worldwide pandemic of Ebola or some other dread disease.  However it is to be done—the dark implications are obvious. 

Then there are the fanatical nihilists who are attracted to death and existential nothingness like metal to a magnet.  Take for example the vile Church of Euthanasia, the WEB site of which has a video of the 9/11 attack with the words, "I like to see the plane coming in."  The "four pillars" dogma of the C of E? "Suicide, abortion, cannibalism, and sodomy."

It should now be clear to everyone that very powerful intellectual and cultural forces are totally dedicated to convincing us that we really aren't all that important.  Those who think otherwise had better answer the call to defend the intellectual ramparts.  Much as at stake.  Demolishing our self perception as a uniquely valuable species would have very grave consequences.  As the philosopher Mortimer Adler wrote many years ago in The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes, if we dismantle the unique moral status accorded to human beings, universal human rights become impossible to sustain philosophically:

Those who now oppose injurious discrimination on the moral ground that all human beings, being equal in their humanity, should be treated equally in all those respects that concern their common humanity, would have no solid basis in fact to support their normative principle.  A social and political ideal that has operated with revolutionary force in human history would be validly dismissed as a hollow illusion that should become defunct…Why, then, should not groups of superior men be able to justify their enslavement, exploitation, or even genocide of inferior human groups, on factual and moral grounds akin to those that we now rely on to justify our treatment of the animals we harness as beasts of burden, that we butcher for food and clothing, or that we destroy as disease-bearing pests or as dangerous predators?

New book, The World Without Us, envisions a future without humans

The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but Environmentalists have their own eschatology—a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us. There's even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether. And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced "The World Without Us," which conjures up a future something like ... well, like the area around Chernobyl—just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1866580/posts

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/about_book.html

An international movement is growing to grant human rights and "personhood" to apes

Members of Parliament in Spain are being asked to support legislation endorsed by the international organization Great Ape Project, which advocates a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes that would confer basic legal rights on great apes. The law would be based on the assertion apes deserve a right to life, freedom and protection from torture.

But Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University of London, maintains human rights cannot be imposed on animals.

"Where do you stop? It seems to be that being human is unique and nothing to do with biology," he said. "Say that apes share 98 percent of human DNA and therefore should have 98 percent of human rights. Well mice share 90 percent of human DNA. Should they get 90 percent of human rights? And plants have more DNA than humans."

World Net Daily

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54959

The Church of Euthanasia advocates dramatic strategies to proselytize for voluntary population reduction

http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/coefaq.html

The wisdom of Leon Kass

Science is notoriously (and deliberately) morally neutral, silent on the distinction between better and worse, right and wrong, the noble and the base... It can offer no standards to guide the use of awesome powers it places in human hands. Though it seeks universal knowledge, it has no answers to moral relativism. It does not know what charity is, what charity requires, or even whether why it is good. Science cannot provide either confirmation of or support for its own philanthropic assumptions...

Many laymen, ignorant of any defensible scientific alternative to materialism, are swallowing and regurgitating the shallow doctrines of "the selfish gene" and "the mind is the brain," because they seem to be vindicated by scientific advance. The cultural result is likely to be serious damage to human self-understanding and the subversion of all high-minded views of the good life.

Leon Kass
Science, Religion and the Human Future

http://www.aei.org/include/pub_print.asp?pubID=25908

Past tothesoure articles on this subject

Constitutional Rights for Pigs
http://www.tothesource.org/10_23_2002/10_23_2002.htm

A Drama Unfolds
http://www.tothesource.org/3_23_2005/3_23_2005.htm

Remade in Our Image
http://www.tothesource.org/11_16_2005/11_16_2005.htm

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